The past few years of my life have been marked by the feeling that I’m somehow behind in life. I think this feeling has escalated since I’ve turned twenty three. In my mind, as long as I was eighteen to twenty two, I was what’s considered to be a “normal” age in college; the age you’re supposed to be in college. Now I’ve ventured outside that societal standard, as I watch all my friends graduate and start careers, some even getting married or moving away.
After high school, I went to Philadelphia, where I intended on going to college. At the end of my first year, I decided I needed to come home to take some time away from school, figure out what I wanted to do, and save up money. I started working in a daycare, as I was considering going into education at the time. As I was formulating my plans to go back to school the following year, the pandemic hit. That summer, it became clear that it was not going away, and instead of starting at a new school where all my classes would be online and I’d be alone all day, I decided to spend another year at home. That year was one of the hardest periods in my life. Isolated from friends, living at home in rural Maine, working full time at a job I no longer wanted to be at, no idea what I was doing with my life, I found myself seriously struggling with my mental health. I ended up seeking therapy, which over time helped me cope and develop plans to start a new chapter.
I’m now a senior in college, and am getting ready to start yet another new chapter after graduation. To be honest with you, I’m so scared. What if I make another wrong decision and end up miserable; what if what I think I want to do for work isn’t really what I want to do; should I stay in the same city or should I move? These are the questions spiraling through my mind constantly. But what I want to share with you are some of the lessons and reflections I have learned about dealing with change these past few years (shoutout to my therapist, love you queen!).
Being someone diagnosed with anxiety and OCD, I tend to focus on the negatives/worst case scenarios of things. When I look back on my time spent working at the daycare, I think about how I was missing out on life experiences and wasting time in a job that I’m not going to pursue in the future. But I rarely think about the beautiful things that came out of that job. I developed so many wonderful relationships with the children and families I worked with. I was lucky enough to be a part of one the most special parts of people’s lives, their childhood. Seeing things through the eyes of children helped me realize the importance of recognizing our own inner children as adults, and instilled a sense of empathy and nurturing that is now one of the things I love most about myself.
I often feel regret about living at home when I “should” have been out in the world developing my independence and meeting new people. But at the same time, I developed such strong relationships with my family, who are now my biggest support system. I’m especially grateful, as my parents are getting older and my sister and I are starting new life paths, that we all had this time together. I also developed close ties with the people in my town, which fostered what is now one of my core values: how important community is. While it’s true that many of them are older, it helped me realize how meaningful it can be to develop friendships across different age groups, and how much we can learn from one another. Even though I often felt isolated due to the fact that it was a rural area with not much going on, I was constantly surrounded by nature. I lived five minutes from the ocean, and almost every day went on walks along the beach, in the woods, or around lakes and rivers. Now I love nature more than I ever did before, and am grateful for this time, especially now living in a city.
My point is not to promote a kind of toxic positivity where you ignore all the bad in order to focus on the good. It’s important to acknowledge and validate yourself when things are bad; it often helps you figure out where you might need change in your life. My point is that if you’re like me, constantly worrying about everything and comparing your life to others, I urge you to try to reflect and focus on what your own personal journey has been, not those of others. Part of the capitalist society we live in (and yes I do relate most problems back to capitalism) is the pressure to do everything now, to be as productive as possible, and to not think about what you’re actually passionate about, but instead choose an expensive school to go to and a career path that will make you the most money, all at the ripe age of 17/18. And if you don’t do that, you’re a failure. But we need to push back against this, because none of us are meant to have everything figured out. The reality is we’re all just trying to do our best in a world where we have little control over anything. I know this is all easier said than done, but if you’re feeling alone in feeling like you’re “behind” in life, you have me and countless others who are all feeling the same and trying to navigate it on a daily basis.
I’ll end with sharing my grandmother’s story, who passed away a few months ago, that often brings me solace. She was born into a family of refugees fleeing the Armenian genocide, and spent her adolescence surrounded by poverty, war, and disease. She came to the U.S. by herself, not knowing English, no place to live, no place to work. This is how she spent the majority of her life. It wasn’t until she got married and had children that she felt some stability. At the age of 51, never having finished high school, she went to college and got her bachelors in Art to pursue her lifelong dream of being a painter. She spent the rest of her life surrounded by loving family, painting in her little art studio on the coast of Maine. You have plenty of time.